Watch out: YouTube exposes your Gmail contacts

Source: Raw Story

'Indicative of the media’s inclination to monetize every last bit of our information,' advocate says

Before you call your spouse over to see the newest cute kitten video on YouTube, you had better check twice to make sure no indiscretions will be exposed on your YouTube homepage.

As part of an effort to make YouTube more like Facebook and other social networking sites, a re-design of YouTube’s homepage for registered users may reveal some of your deepest, darkest email secrets.

The new layout, rolled out over the course of the spring, while you’re logged in displays all of the individuals you’ve emailed with in a large text box front and center on the homepage, in the hope you will connect with them and expand the matrix of viewers of your (and their) videos. But the unsolicited suggestions to connect with exes, former employers or where adult purchases may have been made, isn’t a welcome intrusion for many particularly when it’s based on a history of online correspondence that was presumed to be private.

Read more: http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0628/googles-youtube-exposes-email-addresses-contacts/

hve nice dummy email and information needed to get this account that google will use to strip market you and your information.

Msongs

I dunno why this is so hard for people. It takes about 30 seconds to set up a new Gmail account, then you never use it for anything else. Even better, use a new gmail/yahoo address with fake names and information for every website you use regularly. Always assume everything on the internet wants to sell your data. 99% of the time you're going to be right. The other 1% are places like this that are set up for a specific purpose that isn't "Make as much money as we can as fast as possible.".

i reed youtube comments all teh time their coool!!!11

And it pisses me off.

There is a lot of stuff that's auto-shared, shared by default, and you only have any kind of inkling that it goes on if you dig, and I mean really dig, through all of the privacy options for the various Google services. And I guarantee you will still miss one because some of the services have their own privacy settings which don't show up when you're going through the main Google security page.

Same thing just now when I visited YouTube.

PB

It shows all your google accounts, privacy settings, information sharing etc. on one page. I disagree that a lot of stuff is auto-shared by default; more like 'a lot of people choose the default sharing options without thinking about it.' Google makes it easier to manage this stuff than most other vendors.

...(again) is that if you don't go into every single service individually, you wind up getting all sorts of weird linkages (which I don't want, anyway) between your accounts. I'd been on the Dashboard before, but not recently- thanks for the info.

PB